Babylon Quotes

“Assyria soon discovered a painful truth: empires are like Ponzi schemes: financial frauds in which previous investors are paid returns out of new investors' deposits. The costs of holding imperial territory can only be underwritten by loot and tribute extracted by constant new conquests; empires must continue to expand if they are not to collapse.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

“If history, as by most definitions, begins with writing, then the birth, rise and fall of ancient Mesopotamia occupies a full half of all history.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“But belief in a system cannot be sustained for ever. Empires based solely on power and domination, while allowing their subjects to do as they will, can last for centuries. Those that try to control the everyday lives of their people are much harder to sustain.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

“History may not repeat itself but, as Mark Twain said, it does rhyme.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“Most importantly, Enki was the custodian of the ‘Me’, perhaps pronounced something like Meh, an untranslatable Sumerian expression which the great Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer explained as the ‘fundamental, unalterable, comprehensive assortment of powers and duties, norms and standards, rules and regulations, relating to… civilized life’.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

“A hugely complicated, centrally planned, social and economic system can only be kept on the rails for as long as people believe in it.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

“Without Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest and deportation, Judaism as we know it, and therefore Christianity and Islam in their turn, could never have come to be.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“Highly organized complex societies are delicate machines. It does not take much to bring them to ruin. ‘For want of a nail…the kingdom was lost’, as the old rhyme has it. Civilizations based on ideology are even more fragile than most. As we know from twentieth-century history, once people stop believing in the system, the end is near; no amount of coercion can keep it going indefinitely.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“Anyone who has ever watched children amuse themselves will recognize that the scientific and technological face of civilization is precisely the result of play in its purest form. Just as children are constantly exploring, experimenting, testing and trying things out, for no conscious purpose except the sheer enjoyment of the game itself, so pure science and applied technology play with ideas and toy with the principles and substance of the world; all the time wondering ‘just suppose…’ and asking ‘what happens if…?”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

“For a patrimonial state to be stable over time, it is best ruled with consent, at least with consent from the largest minority, if not from the majority. Instinctive obedience must be the norm, otherwise too much effort needs to be put into suppressing disaffection for the regime's wider aims to be achievable. Consent is, however, not always easy to obtain. The collective view of most societies is rather conservative: in the main people prefer to see the social arrangements of their youth perpetuated into their old age; they prefer that things be done in the time-honoured way; they are suspicious of novelty and resistant to change. Thus when radical action must be taken, for whatever reason, a great burden falls on the ruler, the father-figure, who has to overcome this social inertia and persuade his subjects to follow his lead. In order that his will shall prevail, he needs to generate huge respect, preferably adulation, and if at all possible sheer awe among his people.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

“Those societies in which seriousness, tradition, conformity and adherence to long-established - often god-prescribed - ways of doing things are the strictly enforced rule, have always been the majority across time and throughout the world. Such people are not known for their sense of humour and lightness of touch; they rarely break a smile. To them, change is always suspect and usually damnable, and they hardly ever contribute to human development. By contrast, social, artistic and scientific progress as well as technological advance are most evident where the ruling culture and ideology give men and women permission to play, whether with ideas, beliefs, principles or materials. And where playful science changes people's understanding of the way the physical world works, political change, even revolution, is rarely far behind.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

“The preference for the concrete over the abstract, for practice over theory, for specific examples over general principles, extended into every area of Babylonian study, thought and intellectual life. It was one of the most significant characteristics of this high point of Mesopotamian civilization, indeed of all Mesopotamian civilization both before and long after, which may be one of the reasons why the Greeks, who favoured the opposite approach, have always been credited with the invention and discovery of much that was in reality inherited by them from Mesopotamia.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“Susa, the great holy city, abode of their gods, seat of their mysteries, I conquered. I entered its palaces, I opened their treasuries where silver and gold, goods and wealth were amassed... I destroyed the ziggurat of Susa. I smashed its shining copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam to naught; their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds. The tombs of their ancient and recent kings I devastated, I exposed to the sun, and I carried away their bones toward the land of Ashur. I devastated the provinces of Elam and on their lands I sowed salt.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

“This change in religious belief would have dramatic consequences for the world’s history, the first stage in a revolution that has made our world of today what it is. It oversaw the move from faith in gods of immanence, spiritual representations of the forces of nature, deities who inhabit the world and wear the natural phenomena they represent like a suit of clothes, to gods of transcendence, deities outside, beyond and above nature rather than part of it.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“the role of Assyrian merchants in assisting the development of the Anatolian economy is strikingly reminiscent of that played by the Jews in opening up the interior of Europe during the Middle Ages. Perhaps that is unsurprising: Jewish culture and tradition, as minutely prescribed in the Babylonian Talmud, was itself largely forged in Mesopotamia.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“You have walked no more than a few miles from the city walls when you come to the end of cultivated fields and the great steppe begins, stretching from the foothills of the Zagros Mountains all the way across to Arabia, the tract called in Sumerian edin, which some think gave us the name of Adam and Eve’s garden in the Bible.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“Armed incursions can in principle be militarily opposed. Migration is in the end a more powerful force because it is ultimately irresistible: laws that nations introduce to limit it are ultimately unenforceable.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

“In the reign of Shulgi a wall had been built across the country, more than 250 kilometres long, to keep them out. It was called ‘a wall to keep out the Martu’. Shulgi’s second successor ordered it to be rebuilt and strengthened, calling it Muriq-Tidnum, ‘It Fends Off Tidnum.’ But walls must end somewhere and enemies can often outflank them: in 1940 Hitler made the impregnable French Maginot Line irrelevant by sending his tanks through the forest of the Ardennes. And so it was with Muriq-Tidnum.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“Assyria had no more prospect of halting the human flow than can the British government stop illegal entrants to the UK, although an effective natural moat surrounds the British Isles. There is little hope that the US Department of Homeland Security will have greater success with its border fence than did King Shulgi of Ur and his successors, whose ‘wall to keep out the Amorites’ failed to prevent the migrants’ eventual takeover of all lower Mesopotamia and their founding of Old Babylon.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“social, artistic and scientific progress as well as technological advance are most evident where the ruling culture and ideology give men and women permission to play, whether with ideas, beliefs, principles or materials. And where playful science changes people’s understanding of the way the physical world works, political change, even revolution, is rarely far behind.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“Such people are not known for their sense of humour and lightness of touch; they rarely break a smile. To them, change is always suspect and usually damnable, and they hardly ever contribute to human development.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“There is much irony in the fact that Anglo-American Middle East policy, from Operation Ajax, the deposing of democratically elected, socialist, secularist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the overthrow of secular nationalist dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, has served in fact, if not intention, to ensure the continuing hold of Islam over nearly all the countries of the region.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“And that through all the ups and downs, nothing really worthwhile is ever permanently lost, even though its creators may be long forgotten. When, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, our civilization finally lies dying in the gutter, some of us will still be looking, as the ancient Mesopotamians taught us to do, at the stars.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“But if it were only a matter of attracting success and good fortune to his city and his empire, then being pronounced a god would have meant little more than being appointed a kind of national or city mascot – a role mostly played for us by pet animals these days.”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization

“The gakkul vat, the gakkul vat! The gakkul vat, the lamsare vat! The gakkul vat, which puts us in a happy mood! The lamsare vat, which makes the heart rejoice! The ugurbal jar, glory of the house! The caggub jar, filled with beer! The amam jar, which carries the beer from the lamsare vat!… As I spin around the lake of beer, while feeling wonderful, Feeling wonderful, while drinking beer, in a blissful mood, While drinking alcohol and feeling exhilarated, With a joyful heart and a contented liver, My heart is a heart filled with joy!”
― Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization